About Portkey AI Gateway
Gateway is Portkey's open-source AI gateway, a lightweight service for routing requests to a large catalog of language, vision, audio and image models through one API. It is designed to be fast, reliable and enterprise-ready, and the project says you can integrate with any language model quickly. It also bundles AI guardrails and, per its topics, supports MCP gateway use. It is written in TypeScript under the MIT license.
A quickstart runs the gateway locally, serving the API on port 8787 along with a console. Deployment guides cover Portkey Cloud, Docker, Node.js, Cloudflare, Replit and other targets. Libraries and SDKs listed include JavaScript, Python, REST, the OpenAI SDKs, LangChain and LlamaIndex, so existing applications can point at the gateway with small changes.
The README announces a Gateway 2.0 pre-release in which Portkey's core enterprise gateway merges into open source, and it mentions an open-source model pricing dataset called Portkey Models. A hosted gateway and enterprise offering exist from the vendor, so the project suits both teams who want to self-host routing and those who prefer a managed service.
Key features
- Single API for routing to many LLMs
- Integrated AI guardrails
- Local console for monitoring requests
- Deploys via Docker, Node.js and Cloudflare
- Works with OpenAI SDKs and LangChain
- MCP gateway support
Good fit for
- →Switching between model providers without code changes
- →Adding guardrails to LLM traffic
- Built with
- TypeScript
- Tags
- ai-gateway
- llm
- llmops
- routing
- guardrails
- mcp
- typescript
- openai
Portkey AI Gateway: questions and answers
- What is Portkey AI Gateway used for?
- Portkey AI Gateway routes requests to many language and multimodal models through a single API, with guardrails and several deployment options. It is a good fit for switching between model providers without code changes and adding guardrails to LLM traffic.
- Is Portkey AI Gateway open source?
- Yes. Portkey AI Gateway is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at Portkey-AI/gateway and is written mainly in TypeScript.
- Is Portkey AI Gateway free?
- Yes. Portkey AI Gateway is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available, with paid plans from $49 per month.
- Can I self-host Portkey AI Gateway?
- Yes. Portkey AI Gateway can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
- What is Portkey AI Gateway an alternative to?
- Portkey AI Gateway is an open-source alternative to Amazon Bedrock, OpenRouter and Portkey. Other open-source alternatives to Amazon Bedrock include LiteLLM, LLM Gateway and Dify.
- Is Portkey AI Gateway actively maintained?
- The most recent commit to Portkey AI Gateway was on 25 May 2026, and the latest release is v1.15.2, published on 12 January 2026. The project has 13k stars on GitHub.
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